Prologue: A couple passionately makes love, while their young son Nick climbs out of his crib, and climbs onto a desk by an open window. The son falls to his death on the snowy ground below. At the moment of the child's death, She is shown in sexual climax.
Chapter One: Grief: During Nick's funeral, She collapses. The other mourners gather around her, seen with their faces blurred. She spends the next month in the hospital, in and out of consciousness and with little concept of time. When She awakens, She is crippled with grief. Her husband, a therapist, is distrustful of the psychiatric care She is receiving, and takes it upon himself to treat her through psychotherapy. After a less-than-fruitful period at home, during which She tries to free herself from the psychic pain resulting from her child's death largely through sex, He decides to try exposure therapy. He learns that her greatest fear concentrates on a cabin in a place called Eden, at which She spent time with Nick the previous summer, while writing a thesis on gynocide.
The couple travels to Eden. During the journey, while She sleeps, He encounters a deer who does not show fear of him. As the deer turns to leave, He sees a dead fawn hanging halfway out from the doe's womb.
Chapter Two: Pain (Chaos Reigns): They continue toward the cabin. Upon encountering a foot-bridge, She is overcome with fear. She sprints across the bridge and into the forest, leaving her husband to journey after her. It is late evening when He arrives at the cabin, to find her fast asleep.
While at the cabin, during sessions of psychotherapy, She becomes increasingly manic and grief-stricken. Meanwhile, the environment surrounding the cabin becomes increasingly sinister: acorns pelt the cabin like rapid gunfire, He awakes to find his right hand covered in swollen ticks, and at the conclusion of this chapter He comes across a self-disembowelling fox which utters the words "chaos reigns."
Chapter Three: Despair (Gynocide): He finds his wife's thesis studies: pictures of witch-hunts and a scrap-book filled with articles and notes on misogynist topics, in which her writing becomes more frantic and illegible as the pages go on. It is revealed that, during her thesis studies, She came to believe that women are inherently evil. He is repulsed by this theory and criticizes her for buying into the gynocidal beliefs She had set out to criticize.
She asks him to hit her during sex. He at first resists entirely, but when She flees beneath a massive tree and begins masturbating, He eventually chases after her and half-heartedly complies, slapping her a few times while She demands that He hit her harder. While they are making love, numerous human hands are seen emerging from the roots of the tree. This image was subsequently adapted into the principal promotional art for the film.
He goes on to study Nick's autopsy report, which states that the bones in both of the child's feet were oddly deformed. The doctors at the time did not assign any importance to this fact, as it was unrelated to the child's death. He finds numerous photographs of Nick, however, in which his boots are always on the wrong feet. He becomes increasingly agitated upon this bizarre revelation, which has sinister undertones regarding his partner. At this moment She suddenly attacks him, accusing him of planning to leave her, disrobing and mounting him, andcrushing his testicles with a block of wood. While He is unconscious from the pain, She masturbates him until He orgasms, ejaculating blood. In order to prevent him fleeing, She then drills a hole through his leg and bolts a heavy grind-stone through the wound. She then flees outside, throwing the wrench She used to tighten the grind-stone beneath the cabin.
He eventually wakes and drags himself to a fox-hole in which He hides. While She frantically searches for him, He finds a crow buried alive in the fox-hole. The crow, upon being unburied, starts to make a repeating, loud sound, which informs her about his location. He beats it repeatedly, but the crow survives and keeps making the sound. Eventually, She finds him and tries to pull him out. She fails to take him and attempts to dig through to him with a shovel.
Chapter Four: The Three Beggars: Several hours pass, night falls, and, weeping, She apologizes and helps to drag him back to the cabin. Once again in the cabin, He asks her if She wanted to kill him, and She answers "not yet," adding cryptically that "when the three beggars arrive someone must die."
She begins masturbating next to His half-conscious body. There is a flash-back to an alternate view of the prologue, in which She sees what was about to happen to Nick and does not act. It is unclear whether this is meant to be implied reality, or merely an imagined vision symptomatic of extreme guilt. She then takes a pair of scissors and severs her clitoris, letting out a tortured scream.
During the night the couple is visited by the crow, deer and fox from the earlier scenes, and hail beats against the roof of the cabin. The hailstorm begins at a moment when She screams; earlier it had been revealed that women in Ratisbon had been accused of witchcraft and of being able to summon up hailstorms. The crow is heard cawing beneath the floorboards of the cabin. Breaking through the floor, He frees the bird and serendipitously discovers the hidden wrench. She stabs him in the back with the scissors. He eventually removes the grind-stone, and She stops fighting him, after noticing a change of look in his eyes. He strangles her to death. He then burns her on a funeral pyre outside the cabin.
Epilogue: He makes his way from the cabin, eating berries from the ground as the "three beggars" look on. Upon reaching the top of a hill, he looks down to see hundreds of women ascending towards him, their faces blurred.
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